


Nor All Thy Piety Nor Wit

by Isis



Category: The Bedlam Stacks - Natasha Pulley
Genre: Body Horror, Gen, Loss, Post-Canon, Trick or Treat: Trick
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-29
Updated: 2017-10-29
Packaged: 2019-01-26 10:05:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 617
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12555024
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Isis/pseuds/Isis
Summary: Raphael contemplates what he's lost over the years.





	Nor All Thy Piety Nor Wit

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Synergic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Synergic/gifts).



The first thing he lost was suppleness, his joints becoming stiffer as they became stronger. It was a reasonable trade-off, he'd thought, when he had first noticed; they were both useful characteristics, but if improving one meant degrading the other, it was not a poor bargain.

The second thing he lost was touch: no longer was he sensitive to heat or to cold. He had noticed it vaguely, when he went out in the sharp chill of early spring and only later realised that he had left his coat behind, but it wasn't until he woke up in the woods after Harry had gone – over seventy years after Harry had gone – that heat and cold lost their meaning entirely for him. The trade-off, he supposed, was the impervious stone that his skin was becoming. He wasn't sure it was worth it, but of course at that point he had no choice. 

He remembered Merrick asking, curiously, about his coffee-drinking, considering that he couldn't feel the heat. Raphael had told him that he could taste that it was boiled, and smell the steam, but that hadn't been a full answer. The truth was that after that long sleep, everything tasted different to him than it had before. His tongue was ossifying along with the rest of him.

And now there was even less to his senses of taste and smell than there had been. He sipped from the cup Merrick had given him. It could have been water.

"It tastes different at this altitude," said Merrick, and Raphael looked sidelong at him, wondering how it was that Merrick knew what he had been thinking about. Perhaps it was evidence of the closeness they'd developed, a kind of sensitivity that twenty years hadn't dulled. Or perhaps it was only a platitude to fill the space between them.

"I miss the taste of chocolate," he said. It had already been hard to distinguish chocolate from coffee before this last period of change. It had been a thing of texture rather than of taste. He wondered whether his mouth still had the ability to sense that difference.

"I could have someone fetch you chocolate, if you'd rather."

"There's no point. I can remember it. It would be a pity to tarnish that memory with something less."

"Is it so much less, now?" 

There was a weight behind those words. Raphael considered. "Some things are diminished, and other things are increased."

Merrick laughed. "I'm afraid I'm in the former category. You look exactly as you did when I first knew you, and I'm nearly an old man."

He looked at Merrick for a long moment, letting the light sink slowly through his clouded eyes. It was like looking at the world from underwater. That was, perhaps, the third thing he had lost. It was hard to tell, having only so recently awoken. 

"I am much older than you, you know." 

"I know."

Merrick glanced over at the guards, then placed his left hand carefully on Raphael's arm. Raphael felt the weight of it like a feather, like a breath of wind. Something that would be gone in a moment. And it would be, even if to Merrick the moment took years to pass.

That was the real loss, Raphael realised. Not sight nor taste nor touch, but time. Harry had named it from the beginning. _You have lost almost as much time as you've lived_ , he had said. Markayuq might live for hundreds of years, but that span, long beyond the lifespan of ordinary men, was no gift. It was a loss; the loss of the ability to have a human relationship, over a human lifetime. And nothing could balance those scales.


End file.
